Physician receives maximum sentence

It wasn’t the familiar voice of hits such as “Billie Jean” and “Thriller” but the slow, slurring recording of the singer that was found on his physician’s cellphone that helped persuade a judge to sentence the doctor to jail for four years.

The four-minute recording was one of the blockbuster revelations of physician Conrad Murray’s involuntary manslaughter trial, a previously unknown piece of evidence that revealed an impaired Jackson describing his ambitions and aspirations as his personal physician listened.

It was also one of the trial’s most haunting moments and stuck in the mind of Superior Court Judge Michael Pastor as he considered in recent days how to sentence Murray for causing Jackson’s unexpected death in June 2009. It wasn’t the only thing the judge considered — he unwaveringly assailed the cardiologist’s decisions and ethics for nearly 30 minutes yesterday — but helped persuade Pastor to give Murray the maximum sentence.

Jurors unanimously convicted Murray on Nov. 7, but it was up to Pastor yesterday to sentence the doctor and explain his punishment.

“Of everything I heard and saw during the course of the trial, one aspect of the evidence stands out the most, and that is the surreptitious recording of Michael Jackson by his trusted doctor,” Pastor said.

Murray’s attorneys never explained in court why the recording was made, and prosecutors said they do not know what substances Jackson was under the influence of when the audio was recorded six weeks before his death. Murray had been giving the singer nightly doses of the anesthetic propofol to help him sleep.

The doctor’s time in a Los Angeles jail will be automatically reduced to less than two years because of California’s prison overcrowding and budget woes.

Murray, 58, will have plenty of time if he wants to consider Pastor’s harsh rebuke of him. The Houston-based cardiologist will be confined to a one-man cell and kept away from other prisoners.

The judge called the doctor’s actions a “disgrace to the medical profession” and said he displayed a “failure of character” and had showed a complete lack of remorse for his significant role in causing Jackson’s death.

“It should be made very clear that experimental medicine is not going to be tolerated, and Mr. Jackson was an experiment,” Pastor said. “The fact that he participated in it does not excuse or lessen the blame of Dr. Murray, who simply could have walked away and said no, as countless others did.”

Defense attorney J. Michael Flanagan said after the sentencing hearing that Murray made the recording accidentally while playing with a new application on his iPhone. He deleted it, but a computer investigator recovered it from the doctor’s phone after Jackson’s death.